Guest essay by JohnA
Yes, it’s been a while because frankly, it’s difficult for me to keep following eco-Armageddon when I keep falling asleep or doing other stuff like living and working.
But then this popped up:
This leads to the original paper with the catchy title “Geodetic measurements reveal similarities between post–Last Glacial Maximum and present-day mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet” by Khan et al
The abstract goes (stay awake at the back!) like this
Accurate quantification of the millennial-scale mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet (GrIS) and its contribution to global sea-level rise remain challenging because of sparse in situ observations in key regions. Glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) is the ongoing response of the solid Earth to ice and ocean load changes occurring since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM; ~21 thousand years ago) and may be used to constrain the GrIS deglaciation history. We use data from the Greenland Global Positioning System network to directly measure GIA and estimate basin-wide mass changes since the LGM. Unpredicted, large GIA uplift rates of +12 mm/year are found in southeast Greenland. These rates are due to low upper mantle viscosity in the region, from when Greenland passed over the Iceland hot spot about 40 million years ago. This region of concentrated soft rheology has a profound influence on reconstructing the deglaciation history of Greenland. We reevaluate the evolution of the GrIS since LGM and obtain a loss of 1.5-m sea-level equivalent from the northwest and southeast. These same sectors are dominating modern mass loss. We suggest that the present destabilization of these marine-based sectors may increase sea level for centuries to come. Our new deglaciation history and GIA uplift estimates suggest that studies that use the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite mission to infer present-day changes in the GrIS may have erroneously corrected for GIA and underestimated the mass loss by about 20 gigatons/year.
Now the paper is quite detailed as to how they take the measurements of an ice sheet that is three times the area of Texas and contains good stuff about isostatic rebound due to ice mass loss and how they calibrate the gravity measurements taken by the GRACE satellites to measurements taken all around Greenland.
Actually in the middle of this, they make an admission that nobody notices (because no-one reads these things)
The onset of increasing flow of the northeast Greenland ice stream (the largest flow feature of the ice sheet), for example, has been linked to a geothermal hot spot (14, 31)
Say what? That a large amount of increased flow comes from natural tectonic processes? What exactly can we do about that? Tax it?
And bad news for climate models
We demonstrate the importance of correctly accounting for GIA when using Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite data, because a proportion of the mass gain in central Greenland reported in several recent studies [for example, Sutterley et al. (32)] using GRACE and predicted by models in a warming climate (33) could be an artifact of an erroneous GIA correction in the interior.
So it’s worse because the apparent ice gain in the center may be due to how quickly Greenland rebounds to lessening ice thickness. Oh, and the models are therefore incorrectly calibrated and wrong.
But here’s the money quote that found its way into distinguished scientific journals such as the New York Post (shown as a percentage)
As a consequence, studies will underestimate ice mass loss inferred from GRACE observations by 19 Gt/year when using ICE-5G as a GIA correction.
But 19 Gigatonnes per year more than what?
From the New York Post we get this:
The already unstable ice sheet in Greenland is melting faster than previous research has showed, according to a new report.
The new study, published in Science Advances, discovered that the island is losing 550 trillion pounds of ice a year — 40 trillion, and about 7.6 percent, more than scientists previously thought.
The number is equivalent to losing the weight of 50,000 Empire State Buildings, according to the Associated Press.
At last, Real numbers! 550 trillion pounds per year is lost from Greenland, an increase of 40 trillion from previous estimates! 50,000 Empire State buildings! That must be a lot of water, mustn’t it?
But it’s in pounds not kilograms so let’s convert to sensible units
550 trillion pounds is 5.5 x 10^14 * 0.453592 = 2.49 x 10^14 kg
So approximately 250 gigatons (1 GT =10^12 kg) per year
That mass of ice turns into water in the Earth’s oceans and occupies a volume of
2.49 x 10^14/1000 = 2.49 x 10^11 cubic meters of water are added to global sea levels from Greenland.
How much would that raise sea levels?
The surface area of the world’s oceans is 361.9 million square kilometers. So making our units consistent that’s 361.9 x 10^6 x 10^6 = 3.619 x 10^14 square meters.
That means that the volume of water from Greenland every year would add an extra
2.49 x 10^11/(3.619 x 10^14) = 0.0006893 meters
which is 0.689 millimeters or 0.0271 inches to global sea levels every year.
That additional 40 trillion pounds actually added 0.045 mm/yr to global sea levels.
According to one co-author it’s scary
“It is pretty scary,” Michael Bevis, a professor at Ohio State University and co-author of the study, told the AP. “If you look at the last 15 years since we’ve been having these measurements, it’s clearly getting worse.”
Yes, it’s scary if you’re as easily scared as they clearly are at OSU.
By the way, your fingernails grow at around 3.5mm per month = 3.5 x 12 = 42 mm/year so your fingernails grow 42/0.693 = 60 times faster than the rise in sea-levels due to Greenland melting.
Will snails be in trouble?
Snails can travel up to 25 meters/day which is 25*365.24 = 8765 meters per year. which is 12 million times faster than the rise in sea level due to Greenland ice melt. Phew!
I would suggest running for the hills before you drown, but that would be cynical, wouldn’t it?
Back to sleep.
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Yeah but in 1,000 years that will be 27 inches. Think about how that will affect our children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s, children’s children.
You missed a few generations unless you think people will put off breeding ’til they are 50 years old. 🙂
Nope just missed a few ‘…..’s’ at the end of the sentence.
I was wondering if anyone would count. I should have known, after all this is WUWT.
That reminds me of a bad joke:
16 sodium atoms walk into a bar, followed by… Batman!
Nah, you’re wrong, IMO that’s not a bad joke, but perhaps I’m ill-humored. That reminds me of my chemistry teacher at an all-male boarding school who used sex to keep the class attentive. For example, the lovely Oxygen is lounging on the beach, when here comes Hydrogen with his one electron hanging out. She takes him on, but he’s not enough of a man for her so she takes on his brother too, thus H2O. IIRC, it was Fluorine with purple hair on her chest, and chlorine with green…
Fascinating details like ice melts “particularly where it contacts the ocean” kept me enthralled. A lawyer and public radio host like Brian Kahn obviously has contacts with higher ups with insider information, such as ex Goldman Sachs Tim Grandia who directs the Program on Sea Level Rise section of the Surging Seas research program at Climate Central. http://sealevel.climatecentral.org/about/team
The calved berg in the Rita Willaert photo taken 16 years ago off north eastern Greenland, is probably not there now. Truly far worse than we thought.
GIA. Also known as “fat lady in a girdle.” Its gotta pop out somewhere.
Can’t you picture stone age man postulating: “Just imagine how much the oceans will rise when the ice age ends and these continental glaciers melt.”
ROFL! You owe me a keyboard.
I quote: “Bad news keeps flowing for icy landscapes of the world. Rising temperatures are melting and sending it to the ocean, a process that is pushing sea levels higher and altering the landscape at both poles.” Quite true that sea level is rising because we are still coming out of the Little Ice Age. But not at the rate Al Gore imagines. His Nobel Prize winning movie had the sea rising at twenty feet per century when actual sea level rise tor that is just ten inches. But you can’t argue with a Nobelist and corrections I sent in to both Science and Nature were rejected without even bothering with peer review.
Not both poles are involved, just the North Pole is. With the exception of the Antarctic peninsula, the Antarctic continent itself is doing just fine, thank you. But the Arctic is melting now faster than ever thanks to the fact that a rearrangement of North Atlantic current system took place at the turn of the twentieth century. As I showed in 2011 this is due to the redirection of the Gulf Stream water into a pre northerly flow. Prior to that there was nothing in the Arctic except for two thousand years of slow cooling. The present flow pattern did not stabilize until 1970 when the ice melt we observe now first became obvious. Spielhagen et al. have measured the temperature of water that enters the Arctic Ocean from the Atlantic and found that it exceeded anything reaching the Arctic for the last 2000 years. Because of this warm Gulf Stream water the Arctic is nowwarming faster than the Antarctic is. Take that away and both poles will be equally cold.
Have you a source for the rearrangement of the North Atlantic current system at the turn of the 20th century? I ask because I am looking for an explanation for what I believe was a substantial change in the “continentality” of European and perhaps Russian climates that took place close to 1895 or 1900. I have never seen anything about this in “the literature”.
What about all the water we us for irrigation and for drinking. All this water eventually gets to the oceans. I mean we are draining some massive aquifers all over the world.
Probably so, and speculatively, given no increase in rate of sea level rise as per gauges not ajudicated(heh) satellite, then a lack of that temporary, artificial, anthropogenic, input from aquifers would mean that the natural rate of sea level rise has already slowed down. Trouble ahead, less trouble behind.
Hmmm. Look so far to East Africa.
Well, not yet, there, nor to windy Kilimanjaro; I meant East Antarctica.
===============
Well there is that atmosphere up there for the water to come and go from / to.
g
CAGW units of measure:
“Hiroshima Bombs” for energy instead of Joules.
“Empire State Buildings” for mass instead of gigatons.
SCARY stuff!!
I’m sure there are others.
Al Gore sightings
There is “The Gore Effect”
Blizzards at climate alarmist get-togethers and such.
Those would be negative feedbacks.
Don’t forget.. sea ice area.
1 million km² = 1 Wadham.
Boop boop dittum datum Wadham choo!
And they swam and they swam all over the ice?
Seems to me that it Greenland were adding over a half mm ever year we’d notice an acceleration in sea rise.
Maybe there’s an increase in snow fall that negates it.
OMG! Freshwater ice melts when it comes in contact with sea water? The horror! Why did nobody know about this before?!?
Seriously, there’s this massive layer of dirt up on most of the Glacier now. For $48 million dollars plus shipping and handling we could line up Zamboni 446’s a kilometer wide and clear 30 square kilometers of melt-causing dust per day!
on second thought, spraying tub and tile cleaner by aircraft would probably be much more economical
As I understand the outcomes of that paper, the changes that GIA has caused have already occurred. Similarly, the ice loss that the paper identifies must have also already occurred.
It appears to be another example of now having highly precise data where only estimates existed before. It suggests to me that the historical record for Greenland’s total ice volume may need to be adjusted, which is why the paper refers to millenial scale and uses as its baseline the LGM of 21000 years ago.
Since SLR has been in the order of 130m since then, I assume this paper is suggesting that the additional historical melting of Greenland’s ice sheets have already contributed 1.5m to that SLR. It also means that the additional 19Gt of ice melt per year from Greenland already contributes to the 1.7mm steady increase in SLR that we have been experiencing for the last 8000 years or so.
As far as I could work out, the paper provided no evidence that Greenland’s ice loss is recent or driven by CAGW. Which makes the title of the lead article, and its first few sentences, nonsensical. But then, why should people expect a “Senior Science Writer” at an “independent organization of leading scientists and journalists” such as Climate Central to actually understand science?
I can just imagine our cave-man ancestors loosing their minds at the retreat of the glaciers. Can you picture the doom-sayers of today as cave-men, running about and hooting wildly at the retreat of the ice sheets. Without immediate action, Britain and Ireland would become islands! The land bridge or the North Pacific would be forever lost beneath the waves and travel would be cut between two continents! How would cave-humanity survive! Cave paintings everywhere will illustrate how the killing of Mammoths and the use of fire are the direct cause of the calamity. As such, there should be a moratorium on hunting, limitations placed on gathering, and outright bans on firemaking. Only then do they stand a chance of restoring the glaciers to their resplendent glory and prevent the destruction of the world (and cave-man kind). Speaking of cave-man kind, should the aforementioned measures fail to have the desired effect, quotas will be placed on cave-person reproduction.
I, for one, am glad our cave-ancestors didn’t take this route of action.
Vukevic et al re hotspot. It sits under Iceland now but 55 Ma years ago or so, when Greenland and the UK were juxtaposed, it was under both the Greenland and the UK rifting margins. It is likely part of the reason the rift separated Greenland and UK where it did.
Drat. Climate scientists are wrong again. When will this end? How much longer do we need to pay these idiots?
1. Is there a more-or-less established/accepted estimate of the total mass, in gigatons, of the Greenland ice sheet? This would put the 250 gigatons lost-ice-per-year estimate in context.
2. Also: how far back do the estimates of loss-rate go? In other words, have scientists estimated how many gigatons of ice were being lost/gained per year back to 1950? 1900? 1850? How does 250 gigatons compare to historical loss rates?
Greenland melt is the part of the AMOC salinity – downwelling feedback loop that comes just before AMOC shutdown.
Here is an example of a paper describing AMOC bistability:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50289/full
Is Greenland ice is melting due to global warming?
If it is due to global warming then why it is not melting ice in the Antarctic zone?
Is greenland ice melting in summer and recovering in winter a part of a natural cycle with seasonal variability?
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Great news! I may be able to afford that seaside apartment after all.
Wouldn’t it be a shame if some ancient cemeteries ware exposed again to sunlight and springlike temperatures… of course, it’s fall now- so if there is a continued melt, the sky may indeed fall. But I suspect the falling AMO cycle will not let us farm in Greenland again yet.
Slightly off topic. NASA says that plumes of water were sighted 125 miles high erupting from Jupiter’s Moon Europa yet from what I can gather, Europa’s surface temperature at the equator never rises above minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit! If I spit out at minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit I am fairly confident that the expectorant will hit the pavement as a lump of ice! Could someone put me straight?
Reblogged this on The GOLDEN RULE and commented:
How the “climate change” activist movement works:
A scientific paper “proving” global warming is found and exploited in the mass media.
The ‘masses’ believe every word.
How we “deniers” work:
Closely look at claimed catastrophic ice loss and sea-level increases.
Find evidence of exaggerated, incorrect, unscientific attempts to invalidate the claims.
The truth is distributed throughout the already-aware section of the public and critically viewed and discussed.
The mass media, devoid of investigative powers due to hierarchy controls, continue to publish “scientific” garbage,
The masses remain unaware and continue to support the scientifically unsupportable, political agenda that is deliberately crippling our economies and independence.
All is far from well in our society!
I think all of you are barking up the wrong tree. Ice accumulation on Greenland commenced 432,000 years BP. The accumulation has been more or less linear. There are no breaks in the physical ice record to coincide with sea level changes. Ice accumulation has been more or less constant regardless of the changes in CO2 and other ‘greenhouse’ gases measured in the ice cores. On the guest author, John A, of the essay his calculations confirm how little alleged ice melting could have contributed to sea level changes. Rather I take the view that it is necessary to invoke the little understood expanding and contracting earth theory as the mechanism to allow for the sea level changes. Sure there have been glacial advances and retreats caused by ‘temporary ice’ areal changes. However, the amount of water tied up in these temporary events is relative miniscule as the calculations show. Of themselves, the ‘temporary’ glaciers cannot hold enough water to account for such changes.
Great article, thanks for doing the numbers.